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Former Attorney Pleads Guilty to Bitcoin Fraud That Bilked Investors Out of $5M

Philip Reichenthal and his co-conspirators persuaded their victims to send them millions of dollars to buy bitcoin and then just pocketed the money themselves.

Обновлено 11 мая 2023 г., 3:59 p.m. Опубликовано 11 февр. 2022 г., 9:18 p.m. Переведено ИИ

A former attorney pled guilty in Manhattan federal court on Friday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud as part of a scheme to defraud investors who thought they were investing in bitcoin.

Philip Reichenthal, together with co-conspirator Randy Craig Levine and several associates, persuaded victims to send him millions of dollars, saying he would act as an escrow agent to purchase bitcoin for them. But neither Reichenthal nor his associates ever provided any bitcoin to the investors nor refunded their money.

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Reichenthal was arrested on Sept. 14, 2020, for the crime. The 78-year-old Reichenthal, who was disbarred in October 2019 in a Florida court, faces a maximum term of 20 years in prison. Extradition proceedings against Levine, who’s been on the run from U.S. authorities since 2005, are pending.

According to the charges, Reichenthal and Levine engaged in two fraudulent schemes. In the first one, in 2018, Levine induced a man to wire over $3 million to Reichenthal from an over-the-counter crypto broker to fund the purchase of bitcoin, which was never made. In the second, in 2019, Levine persuaded a Florida man to send over $2 million to Reichenthal for buying bitcoin, which he also never purchased.

The prosecutor in the case, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, said “as a licensed attorney and escrow agent, Philip Reichenthal was entrusted to keep investors’ money safe. But as he admitted today, he betrayed that trust by siphoning millions of dollars of investor money.”

Crime Fraud

Nelson Wang

Nelson edits features and opinion stories and was previously CoinDesk’s U.S. News Editor for the East Coast. He has also been an editor at Unchained and DL News, and prior to working at CoinDesk, he was the technology stocks editor and consumer stocks editor at TheStreet. He has also held editing positions at Yahoo.com and Condé Nast Portfolio’s website, and was the content director for aMedia, an Asian American media company. Nelson grew up on Long Island, New York and went to Harvard College, earning a degree in Social Studies. He holds BTC, ETH and SOL above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.